The suffragette movement in H.G. Wells’s Ann Veronica and May Sinclair’s The Tree of Heaven

Abstract

The suffragette movement in H.G. Wells’s Ann Veronica and May Sinclair’s The Tree of Heaven In H.G. Wells’s Ann Veronica (1909), the eponymous heroine embraces new womanhood and a range of feminisms in her search for life. Ann Veronica attends suffrage and other radical meetings in London once she has left her father and home in order to “live”. She is arrested during a raid on the House of Commons, while trying to defend an elderly suffragette. However, the harshness of prison life forces Ann Veronica to see the error of her ways and to seek a reconciliation with her father upon her release. Here, militant suffragism is portrayed as a turning point. It is a reaction that brings down all the powers of patriarchy upon her and causes her to accept “life” as it is rather than seek to change it. May Sinclair’s 1917 novel The Tree of Heaven explores the key issues of the early twentieth century: feminism, modern art, technology and sexual freedom. All represent danger for the growing Harrison children, Dorothea, Michael and Nicholas. Dorothea is fascinated with suffragism and feminism, yet, like Sinclair herself, she also fears it. She approves of the idea, but is sceptical about the militant suffragism. Both Ann Veronica and Dorothea Harrison regard the Vote as only one point in a wide programme for the elevation of their sex. They have no clear conception of the new position of women in society, but are much disappointed to find that the prominent suffragettes have in reality no grasp of the profound changes that are taking places in the relationship between the sexes, nor of how little the Vote itself means. They are equally disappointed as Wells and Sinclair were.